“I had a white suit made in 1960, started wearing it in January – and found it annoyed people tremendously. It’s kind of a harmless form of aggression.” Tom Wolfe

The Feminist/Race Hustlers Lose One

The Dominique Strauss-Kahn case is one of competing political narratives. I liked the narrative of the hypocritical “socialist” big shot who lives like an aristocrat and who thinks he can have his way with any woman he wants being brought down by the “penniless,” African hotel maid.

In retrospect, I and all the others who bought that narrative should have realized from the start that it was just too good to be true.

So it now appears that the perfect victim in this case is actually a perfect liar and very possibly a criminal, which makes the feminist/race hustler community very uncomfortable. How will they respond?

They could simply admit their mistake, and as they say, move on. Or they could do what they often do: claim that she is still a victim of rape, regardless of the “discrepancies” in her story and her questionable past, and that to deny her her day in court is just adding to her victimization. Or finally, they could ignore the story as if it never happened. We will see.

New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.

Meantime, the Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz praises New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. for behaving responsibly in admitting his mistake rather than following the politically correct path trod by most ambitious prosecutors who typically pander to the above-mentioned feminist/race hustlers:

…The district attorney’s critics charge that Mr. Vance, who has lost a few cases recently, didn’t want another failure—that he publicized his doubts and blew his case up rather than take that risk. Perhaps. But everything about this accuser and her complaint also suggests the very good chance that the DA could have won the case. Mr. Vance surely knew this, as well.

A zealous prosecutor could have—would have—exploited the racial element here, and the enormous status difference between the wealthy and powerful foreigner and the poor hotel worker. He could have counted on the weeks of vilification by the media, which had helped make Mr. Strauss-Kahn so hated a figure he could find no Manhattan apartment building whose upscale residents were willing to breathe the same air as this (now former) head of the IMF. A prosecutor could count on finding a jury so hostile to the accused, so sympathetic to the accuser, that they could understand—with the help of explanations—all her lies and her involvement with a drug dealer.

That prosecutor would have delivered a familiar message to the jury: Believe the accuser, however incredible, or be guilty of betraying the war against sex abusers and of violating the victim anew. Critics of the DA’s decision to remove the case from the Special Victims Unit indeed point out that the unit’s prosecutors would have had the expertise to deal with an accuser who was, like this one, “not perfect.”

That the man now in charge of the Manhattan DA’s office knows—and has shown that he knows—that the duty of a prosecutor is first and foremost to do justice, not to win cases, is something for which citizens can be grateful. They’ve not had a chance to witness such behavior terribly often.